


She Got Down on Her Knees

by scioscribe



Category: Queenpin - Megan Abbott
Genre: Complicated Relationships, F/F, First Time, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 19:59:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13015086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: In the mirror, back behind my shoulder, she wasn’t beautiful at all: cobra-lidded eyes, worn lipstick on her mouth.  I didn’t care.  I was starved for her.  I was about to get indelicate.





	She Got Down on Her Knees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bygoshbygolly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bygoshbygolly/gifts).



I can’t say when I decided I wanted her.  After a while, she was just there whenever I closed my eyes, the afterimage of the sun waiting for me in every bed, in every dark room.

I’d like to say I fell for her this one night at the Lily, a steak-and-roulette joint with pretensions evident in the name but nowhere else; we were at a scratched-up mahogany table over in the bar and the candy-colored lights off the casino floor were dyeing her up till she looked like either a harlequin or a whore.  The steak was good.  I cut into it thinking how she’d cut into anybody who mistook her for anything just because the lights were in their eyes and fuck me but it improved my appetite.  So maybe that was where it began.  She ordered crème brûlée for dessert and she tapped the caramelized sugar with her spoon and when it broke with a brittle snap, I thought, _I’d let you break me, Gloria.  I really would._

But by then I’d been her girl for so long I never had just one thought at a time.  They all came in braids, one twist working around the other.

So when she cracked that crème brûlée, the other thing I thought was, _Bet it’s so sweet underneath.  Bet you’re not, but I’d sure like a taste to know for sure._ She put a bite between her lips.  Satin-fine into satin-fine.  I wanted to get through the outside of her.

But that’s not when I wanted her, that’s just when I knew it for sure, knew it past denial.  Most of the time, though, that run in your stocking’s started long before you catch it.  I guess if I were being honest with myself, I wanted her from the moment I saw her.  Saw those legs.  I guess if I were being honest, I would have gotten down on my knees for her right there in the Tee Hee.

*

Well, realizing it spoiled me for the casual fumbles I’d been halfway enjoying.  Hands with poker chip calluses on my tits, boozy breath in my mouth, diaphragm always in, door always shut on his way out: wham-bam, thank you, Dan.  Or Stan.

I fooled myself for a bit thinking all I needed to change around were the names.  I shopped around for the bars where the hard-jawed chippies had eyes only for each other and I went into one fresh as a piece of pink bubblegum and looking to get chewed.  I took home a brassy blonde with poison-green nails she raked up and down my back; you could tell she didn’t take my innocent act too seriously, that she knew I could take it.  I think I did all right for a rook.

I liked it all fine, maybe even a shade better than fine, but it wasn’t what I wanted.  Even when I thought about her while it was all going on, it wasn’t enough.  I kept thinking of Gloria behind me in that first mirror-walled fitting room, Gloria with that gold-tipped cigarette.  What look had been in her eyes when she’d said my ass was our ticket just as much as her legs?

“And that rack won’t hurt either,” she’d said, and even back then, my nipples had stiffened up.

I was her girl, like she’d always said.

*

Oh, she could smell it on me.  Not the lust—drench yourself in enough perfume and it makes no never-mind where else you might be soaked through—but the secret.

She was above asking what had gotten into me.  I was about to catch a copper-jacket bullet in the back of my head on some dark night because she would lose faith in me.  That was what I thought, and I knew I was in love because I was almost up for it.  At least it would be quick.  I was dying for her in dribs and dribs anyhow.

Then one night we were at her place and she’d asked me for a smoke and a light.  I did what I always did: put one in my mouth and got it going before I handed it over to her.  I’d done it a hundred times without thinking about it, but it was the end of a long day, and I wasn’t as careful as I should have been.  She saw it.

That cigarette lasted just two drags.  Then she stubbed it out and said, “Come on into the bedroom for a minute, doll.  I want to put something around that throat of yours that’ll make the high-rollers swoon when they get an eyeful of it.”

“What happened to invisibility?”

“Starting Monday, I’m going to put you in a circle or two where not having the right stones will be a dead giveaway you’re in the wrong room.  Your invisibility’s gonna have to get prettied up.”

“Swell, so I get a new collar.”

“A new collar and a longer leash, if you want one.”

I didn’t.  I wanted to stay right by her side, so close that when we walked her skirt sometimes rubbed against me, nubbly wool against good linen.  But it was like I said before about the braid, how I was done with only feeling one way at a time.  Sure, I wanted more breathing room, wanted to be not her right hand so much as the proverbial left, wanted her to not always know what I was doing, wanted her to have to take it on trust that I was being good as gold, clean as a whistle.  Sure.  Nobody gets into this business unless they want it all.

I went with her into the bedroom.  I’d kicked off my shoes at the door like we were old friends and her carpet was thick and cloud-like under my stocking feet.

She opened up her jewelry case and dipped her hand in and out, quick as a cat scooping the goldfish out of the bowl.  She’d known exactly what one she was offering.

It was my favorite piece in the whole collection.  No surprise there.  I’d kept only one secret from her, one little fact I hid behind my teeth when I gave her my smile, and it sure as shit wasn’t my taste in jewelry.

It was all onyx and pearls and heavier than sin.

“You’ve got good taste, honey,” Gloria said.  She moved me in front of the floor-length mirror; stood behind me and drew the necklace across my throat.  “These have got more reserve than diamonds.  No showboat sparkle, we’re talking more of a come-hither look.  That’s class.  You like that?”

I slid one fingertip up between my collarbone and a pearl.  “I wouldn’t mind taking it out for a spin.”

“See?” she said.  “No hard-sell.  The kind of girl who waits for something good to come to her.  You had that look on your face from the first time we met.”

“And in you walked,” I said.  “So who’s to say I was wrong?  I put in my hustle afterwards and I figure that’s enough.  I’d just as soon keep a thing as earn it.”

“The necklace you can keep,” Gloria said.  “Now leave it on and take everything else off.  You can blush if you got to, baby, I gave you rocks that go with any color.”

I felt like glass at a glassblower’s, made so hot I could be molded however she wanted, made so she could always see right through me.  And there I was in my racetrack day-suit, a demure peachy pink.  The blush didn’t go with that at all: call it too much of a good thing.  I guess it was some reassurance that she hadn’t had foresight long enough to see this coming way back when she’d still been laying out bills on my wardrobe.  I’d have gone to bed with her even if she had but I liked to think I had surprised her at least a little.  At least in that moment when I had watched her lips close around that cigarette.

“Can’t be uncoordinated,” I said dryly, hoping it’d seem in some way coy when really I was just parched, so thirsty for her my lips were cracking with it.  “I guess you’re right.”

In the mirror, back behind my shoulder, she wasn’t beautiful at all: cobra-lidded eyes, worn lipstick on her mouth.  I didn’t care.  I was starved for her.  I was about to get indelicate.  I unbuttoned my jacket and let it fall to the floor and then I shimmied out of first the cream-colored blouse and then the peach-colored skirt, one-two-three, until there I was in nothing but my stockings and my underwear.  Let her get a look at the ass and the rack she’d praised.  Let her want _me_ for a change, dammit.

But she didn’t break a sweat over me at all.  “I think I said everything, doll, not just everything you want.  You think I want my hands on the cups of that brassiere?  Silk, I’ve felt a time or two before, but not you.  Not as eager as you are now.”

I let the rest go too, then, until I was as naked as a fantasy.  I was all fucked up about it in my head, hoping she’d envy how high my tits were even without the bra, hoping she’d hate me as much as I was hoping she’d love me.

And then it was funny—it was Gloria all over, looked at it one way, but looked at another, it was like nothing that had ever happened to me before, with her or with anyone else.  I got everything I wanted.

“Pretty girl,” Gloria said.  She kept me staring at myself in the mirror and put her hand around me, flattened her palm against my belly.  “All taut and tucked-in.  See, I knew when I picked out that honey hair for you that that was what you had underneath, I could pick it out of your eyelashes, the down on your arms, baby, I had you memorized like a song.”  She moved her hand lower and put her fingers in the crinkly hair between my legs.  I gasped automatically and widened my stance and she smiled, hard and victorious, and then of course just flitted her touch there briefly, butterfly-light, before she moved on.

She held my tits in her hands with just the pink tips of my nipples peeking through her fingers; my own reflection looked back at me glassy-eyed, mouth open in a moan.  I wanted to be inside her mouth.  She told me I was her beautiful girl and I believed her.

“I like you like this,” she said contemplatively.  “All ragged and wet for me.  But just for me.  It’s not the kind of thing you can put in wide-distribution.  Damn, but you’re gorgeous, though, baby girl.  You’re dessert on legs.”

“Crème brûlée,” I whispered.

“Sure, if you want.  Crème brûlée.”

She didn’t understand what I meant, what I was thinking, and I loved the bitter satisfaction of that—didn’t everybody always need a little salt to cut the sweet?

To hell with balance, though.  Nobody got into bed with Gloria Denton thinking they were going to have everything run fair.  I leaned forward until my forehead was against the mirror.  I wanted to smudge her shiny things up until the place was filthy with me, that was how wonderfully dirty I felt.

“Fuck me, Gloria,” I said.

Gloria kissed my shoulder.  “I like a girl who knows what she wants.”

She got down on her knees.  I never would have seen that coming, not in a million years, but she did it.

For the longest time, as long as I could stand—not just bear, but _stand_ , because by the end of it I was as wobbly-legged as a baby fawn—she just used her fingers, those long fingers with those perfectly manicured nails.  I thought I’d been fucked before, but not like this, and she barely did anything at all.  She toyed with me until I whimpered and begged her for more.  Then she still didn’t turn me around, she just got between me and the mirror, still down on her knees like she’d never been Gloria Denton at all.

I thought about the story of her going around like that to every man in the room, calling herself a world-class cocksucker.  World-class clit-licker, now, but I suddenly knew she was telling the truth about not having done it, not having made a show of herself to all those men.  She might have done it if she’d needed to, but she never would have needed to.  Everything I needed to know about her was in the shiny back of her head in that looking glass.  Titian red hair with my fingers tangled in it as she got her mouth on me.  I knew I was the only one she’d ever gone on her knees for.  Who knows why.

I opened my legs even more and rubbed against her mouth; she steadied my hips with her hands and licked into me with that hot tongue of hers.  Fuck, she made me weak.  My knees were shaking.  But if I fell, I wouldn’t be able to see her, and I wanted to.  I wanted that even more than I wanted to come.

So I bore it like a prizefighter in a championship bout and when I finally gave it all up for her, I did it looking at her hair falling across my hand.  She had put me there to look at myself, but hell, I knew what I looked like.  She was the only thing in the world I wanted to see.

She let me get her onto the bed, onto those slick ivory sheets of hers that smelled of fresh laundry.  I wanted her to tear into them with those long nails of hers.  I was too much of an amateur at the game to use my mouth the way she had without risking getting laughed at—she would have to teach me that like she’d taught me everything else—but I knew other tricks.  With my onyx and pearls beating against my chest, I slotted my thigh between her pretty legs and rocked up against her fast as a rhumba rhythm.  She was sticky-sweet on my bare skin and it wasn’t until then that I realized, really realized, that she was still dressed.

It made me angry and I bit at the buttons on her blouse.

“Don’t be such an animal,” she said, almost snapping at me.  Outside of two spots of high color in her cheeks, her face was still marble-cool.  She undid the shirt herself but left the bra on, like I could content myself with those aquamarine silks between us.  The skirt she just pushed up against her belly, and that I didn’t mind.  I liked that she was so soaked through for me she might as well not have been wearing _those_ silks at all.  I liked the flush of her open thighs against the lacy tops of her stockings.

But that bra, it had to go.

I kissed her there, all along the scalloped rim of the cups, even licking down underneath it, where she tasted a little like sweat, a little like an animal herself.  I felt the slight irregularity of her scar tissue against my tongue.  I didn’t give a damn.

Let her see me plead.  “Come on, Gloria.  I want it all.”  I rubbed the palm of my hand against her cunt.  The braid of those thoughts— _come on and give it to me_ and _let me treat you like a queen._   I didn’t know which one to say.

Luckily, she saved me from having to say anything at all.  She leaned up and undid the clasp behind her and let me tug the bra forward, let me toss it to the ground.  I didn’t know if it’d been the scars that’d made her shy at first, but if she thought I cared about that burn-rippled skin or, what, the softness of her breasts as they fell back against her, she was loco.  She was like an eclipse that would burn my eyes out but that I had to look at anyway.

Vacillating little minx that I was, I was maybe too reverent to be any good at this bit, was maybe too feather-gentle.  But I wanted to feel how soft that untouched skin was against my lips, so I did.  I kept my hand down between her legs so I would feel her tighten up around me, and when she was squeezing my fingers as regular as a glad-hander at an Elks Lodge, I abandoned her breasts and reintroduced my thigh.  My fingers were too hot and slick by then for me to feel how hot she was on her own, and that was what I wanted.  To know what I had done to her.  I was always after that.

She came with her own animal sound and bucked against me; I whispered to her like we were in a place where words made a damn bit of difference.  Look at all that red hair down around her pillow—things like that.

Afterwards, she lit her own cigarette, or I thought she had until she passed it to me.  It was still warm from her mouth, still stained with her lipstick.

“So what happens now?” I said.

“Business as usual, babycakes.  As far as I’m concerned, all we did was stamp a wax seal on something we both knew already.”

“That I’m your girl.”

She reached over and took my chin in her hand, turned my head toward me.  Her eyes were unreadable.  “You bet your sweet ass you are.”

I’d only been fooling myself the whole time.  Her bra on the floor, her hair on the pillow, her mouth on my clit, her knees on the carpet, none of that mattered any more than the words had.  She was still Gloria.  I hadn’t cracked a single fucking thing.  That taste of her didn’t mean I knew her any better than I had before.

We made conversation a little and then I got up to go.  Slid back into my clothes—my demure duds that were now nothing more than the false bottom in the trunk of my car, just something to hide the pricy dirt underneath.  She was leaning up against the headboard, wreathed in cigarette smoke, drinking from a highball glass full of water she’d had on the nightstand.  It must have been lukewarm by then.  If I weren’t a cad, I’d have brought her some fresh, with ice.  Or I’d have brought her something stronger and stayed.  I was too angry for any of that, though, or I thought I was.

No, call the thing what it was—I was sore as hell at her.  What right did she have to be so untouchable even after all that?

It wasn’t until I was on my way out that I passed by that floor-length mirror again and saw myself.  The golden girl, not a hair out of place, but I was used to fixing myself up, so that wasn’t what I stopped to stare at.  What drew me to my own reflection was how much I looked like her.  Impassive as the fucking stones around my neck even with that thresher running full-tilt inside my heart.  Looking at my face, you’d have thought I didn’t feel a thing.

It made me turn back to her.  She took the cigarette out of her mouth and held it a little ways away from her, her face lit only by that glowing little ember.  “Yeah, honey?”

I risked it.  It’s a lousy gambler who decides that because she runs her own rigged game she can wrap her pretty little head around the workings of another, but I was used to the back of the house business, not the goings-on on the floor.  In that one particular way, I was virgin enough to be stupid.  Maybe it was my last bit of innocence and I wanted to give it to her, because God knew I hadn’t given her any before.  I had come to her so ready for the game I’d almost been panting with it.

No, this was all I had to give.  That little bit of hope that maybe we had the same soft center, that I was imitating her mask and not just her face.

I said, “I can stay if you want me to.”

She put her cigarette out in the ashtray and with that little spark gone, and with the moon behind the clouds, there was nothing to see her by.

In that full dark, she said, “Then why don’t you get back in bed,” too flatly to be a question, and I was as funny-shamed as a kid to know that she probably saw the flash of white as I smiled at that.

I started taking off my clothes again.  “Next time say something before I get all the way dressed.”  She didn’t say anything to that, and so, in the silence and the shadows of her bedroom, I made my way back to her by trust alone.  I figured I’d probably bark my shin on something but some things are worth trying for even if they end bloody.


End file.
